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Amazon accidentally turned off large portions of the internet on Monday morning.
A problem at Amazon's cloud computing service disrupted internet use around the world early Monday, taking down dozens of online services, including social media site Snapchat, the Roblox and Fortnite video games and chat app Signal.
About three hours after the outage began, Amazon Web Services said it was starting to recover from the problem. AWS provides behind-the-scenes cloud computing infrastructure to some of the world's biggest organizations. Its customers include government departments, universities and businesses, including The Associated Press.
Amazon pinned the outage on issues related to its domain name system, which converts web addresses into IP addresses so websites and apps can load on internet-connected devices.
"The world now runs on the cloud," and the internet is seen as a utility like water or electricity, Burgess said.
Several major apps were not working. Coinbase, Fortnite, Signal and Zoom faced lengthy outages, as did Amazon's own services, including its Ring video surveillance products.
Millions of companies and organizations rely on AWS to host their websites, apps and other critical online systems. The company has data centers all over the world, and Amazon is said to have at least 30% of the total cloud market.
Amazon did not give a reason for what caused the outage.
https://apnews.com/article/amazon-east-internet-services-outage-654a12ac9aff0bf4b9dc0e22499d92d7
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/20/amazon-dns-outage-breaks-much-of-the-internet/
(Score: 1) by fen on Wednesday October 22 2025, @02:47AM (1 child)
I worked at a big bank and we had to do everything in west and east (west-2, east-1). We had regular network isolation tests (isolate west or east). I'm sure a buncha people got paged for this one.
(Score: 5, Informative) by fab23 on Wednesday October 22 2025, @01:57PM
The culprit was Amazon DynamoDB which failed in us-east-1, see Multiple services (N. Virginia) - October 20, 2025 [amazon.com] on their AWS Health Dashboard [amazon.com] with a timeline of events with a lot of details including a list of the 141 impacted AWS services at the end.
As far as I am aware, the us-east-1 (N. Virginia) AWS region may for some of their internal workings still be the single point of failure. As this was their first region, some of their core services depend on running services in us-east-1. It is not the first time that something in that region failed. As long as your infra is running on simple things own classic EC2 servers or e.g. from services like RDS nodes / clusters and in others regions it may not have been affected. But access to the AWS Console may not have been possible, and so also the API, e.g. if you are using that to dynamically adjust your infra based on load.